This post was waylaid by connectivity and mosquito issues... I'm in Nepal with the marvellous @KimberleyCanada. I sit on a couch in a lobby in Kathmandu. It makes sense to start this trip with a description of how I (and we) ended up here. But I've been turning that over in my head through the first day in Kathmandu and through the long haul to get here and I'm losing time. I poke about with that funny story in my head and I skip chances to share the genuine awe-inspiring things we're getting exposed to, for the sake of being... Continue reading

I’ve been working on/obsessing over donor (and sometimes client) journeys lately. You can lose everything because your path to bringing people in and keeping them in isn’t thoughtful – thoughtful in both the clever and the sentimental sense. So it’s not a bad thing to obsess over, really. Continue reading

I’ve been thinking about how best to share some of these lessons via my blog. Year One seems like a good time to start. So please read on for Part 1 of “Things we can all learn from a F2F fundraiser”. (The “fundraiser worth their salt” part is implied – no, I am not going to spend much time on the practices of people who can’t stick at the job or who have been trained badly or are just fools, unless there’s a point to be made that is greater than, “Don’t do what they do. It’s a bad idea.”) Continue reading

...And by "me", really I mean managing ourselves. I started life coaching again this year - both coaching other people and being coached - and have found myself of late immersed in techniques for how we manage ourselves and how to do it better. Different techniques work for different people of course, so I, on some days at the moment, am up to my ears in trialling different approaches and different techniques, by myself or with others, to see what works for who. I am coming up on a year of flying solo, workwise - what has turned into the... Continue reading

One of the jobs I had while at university in Manchester was at a shop called Schuh. We sold shoes, if that wasn’t immediately obvious. One of the motivational team speeches I was party to regularly was based around how stupid people are. It goes a little like this: Continue reading

There are two parts to this story. I will tell you one and, if you are lucky, my friend Richard might tell you the other, funnier, part one day. This bit is interesting though. Continue reading

Saying thank you is hard sometimes. Personally or professionally. Some people find it easy. Some don't. And I think the latter is actually pretty common. I've just started working with a local DC charity called City at Peace (Did you say innovative conflict resolution for young people? Okay, I'm in...) and I think they just produced, on the fly, one my favourite thank-yous that I've seen in ages - from a non-profit or anyone, really. Continue reading

It’s bad practice to be snide about your competition or opposition. The worst way I think that you can do this is to point to someone else’s problems or failings to deflect from your own. I take that back – it’s worse if you do that and are actively fabricating as you go. But none of the above makes you look good, let’s be honest... Continue reading

I went to a Seth Godin event yesterday. This of course has left me with lots of food for thought. Something landed in my inbox this morning that made me wrinkle my brow then, as I read further, my nose and, with both still wrinkled and probably looking a little rat-ish by this point, think about how we go about finding the right people. Continue reading

This might win the prize for laziest blog I’ve ever written. Are there prizes for that? I’m getting one if there are. I got almost shockingly great feedback to my Twitter and my drug habit post this week (THANK you to anyone who took the time) and at a similar time I got some great feedback from a friend on a brain dump of an email that I’d done for her on how to get started on Twitter. I thought I might just share the email straight, on the off chance that it’s as useful to anyone else as it was to her. Continue reading

So I’ve had an interesting few weeks and not been on Twitter very much at all. I was also hit by a car and knocked off my bike last month. Not to give away the punch line but, I am going to make the case that the two are connected – and for more ideological reasons than “I was in a body cast and couldn’t reach the keyboard”. Let me know what you think. I wasn’t in a body cast, by the way. That was just to make my point. Phewy. Continue reading

I used to live in the U.S., about four years ago, and I am still on one of the Oxfam America email lists. I opened an email from them today. As I was doing so, it occurred to me that this isn’t something I do very often. And it then occurred to me that this was a potentially interesting fact. Continue reading

I’ve been a bit slow off the mark at getting business cards done. They seemed the lesser exciting of things happening right now. But they are, of course, important. So I finally sat myself down to tick this task off the list and they arrived this week and they are lovely. More than that though, the process of getting them was kind of exciting. Not the putting them together, I won’t lie, that was lousy boring, but them arriving was thoroughly enjoyable. Continue reading

Thankfully I was in the room for long enough after the look to demonstrate through my subsequent behaviour that I was not a total bastard, but in fact friendly and generally well meaning. This got me to thinking about second chances and if we are actually in the habit of either grabbing or making the most out of them. Second chances are awesome. This was a second chance – the opportunity, by addressing it directly or not, to remedy a slightly awkward social breach. I had the second chance because I was in a conversation and the nature of conversation is that it is ongoing and a process*. Continue reading

It seems unreasonable to go from unstoppable to useless just because my Internet connection has ground to a halt and, having felt thoroughly told off by a great recent post from Copyblogger on Blogcrastination in the last couple of days, I thought I should pull together a post that’s been bouncing around in my head for a bit. So… Continue reading

I'm a sucker for symmetry. I love finding it in things. Recently I refused for several minutes to let my friend Helen move from standing in front of some fishing nets until I felt I had the appropriate amount of symmetry in the photos to the right*. I also recently, and much more relevantly, found some behavioural symmetry that was very interesting to me... Continue reading